Behavioural Targeting Gaining Traction Online

Do you know who is visiting your website? It’s a very important question for webmasters and online businesses to know the answer to because it translates into revenue for the organisation.

However, it is even more important to know the answer when you are buying ads for your clients. Would you like to ensure that your ads only displaying to relevant market? Would you like to decrease your CPM by a significant amount?

Behavourial Targeting is the answer to your questions.

For those that do not know, behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them. – Source: Wikipedia

What does this mean in terms of dollars and sense? According to Business Week

Marketers can use these tools to reduce online ad costs dramatically. Say your company sells “Bidgets,” a luxury product. Ordinarily you’d run banner ads on FancyOldSite.com, which reaches your target audience of men and women who earn more than $150,000 a year. The ads are expensive—say $60 per thousand impressions—but they reach your ideal audience.

You might instead embed a snippet of code in the banners that run on FancyOldSite.com. This places so-called cookies on the computers of everyone who sees the ad so you can track them when they visit other Web sites. That’s where retargeting kicks in. Every time a former FancyOldSite.com reader who saw your ad visits other Web sites, your Bidget banner ads pop up again. The banner ads reappear because the cookie on that computer flags a retargeting “network” of thousands of sites, saying “This desirable reader is back.” These new ads are cheap—$3 CPM—but they reach exactly the same audience.

So should you be investing in this kind of technology if you are running banner campaigns? Definitely! Not only does this reduce your costs, but at the end of the day, you are sending qualified traffic to your website or online business, which a much higher chance of converting. The only downside of this method are the paranoid web surfers out there that delete or disable cookies all together, because if they do this, the data wont be tracking correctly. Fortunately for advertisers and ad buyers, this practice isn’t mainstream as yet.

How difficult is it to setup? There are many providers out there that provide this kind of service but the key point you want to look for is integration with your CRM system that allows you to see what your clientele are doing on your website as well. Basically, we want to know everything about everyone. Is that too much to ask?

The best news? The price is slowly becoming right for SMEs and not just the big boys. So jump on board!